First trip to Home of Hope

I will try to describe my experience so that you can feel as though you are there....You beep your car horn for the gate keeper to open the gate and when you pull in you see a statue of Mary in a small garden. There is a larger garden behind the smaller one. To the right is an office, to the left is the building where all the children are. As you turn around…to the right of the gate are the stairs that lead you down to the rooms of children. The first section seems to be classrooms of some sort…I saw older children in those…then as you continue down the stairs you begin to hear more baby sounds. There is a door that opens to a long dark hallway. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust. Then you go to the second door on the right and walk into a blue room with about 50 blue, meta,l basinet sized cribs all lined up in the center of the room. There are windows on only one wall of the room so it is dimly lit. There is a long changing table set up on the window wall. To the left of the changing table are about 4 or 5 larger cribs with older/toddlers. The back wall is where there are 2 or 3 super sized cribs where all the older infants go to play while their bedding gets changed…they also are fed their solid food while sitting against the rails with their legs dangling through the bars. The wall opposite the window also has about 6 larger cribs. And the wall opposite the super-sized cribs in a wall full of closets and storage of baby clothes and blankets, etc. I would say that there were about 5 women that helped take care of all the babies. I saw those babies get bathed and fed and rubbed with lotion every morning. They got clean sheets and blankets every day. Some workers were playful and loving, others were more reserved and less affectionate. But I did feel that the children received decent care and most babies were thriving and responded to my voice and made eye contact and smiled and played with their toys. Each crib has a toy tied across the top.
It is my understanding that many of the nuns on staff are registered nurses so they do get good medical care. They do get some immunizations at the orphanage and they seemed to have a good supply at the time of antibiotics, Tylenol, advil, etc. The biggest issue that I could see was DIAPERS!!! They used torn bed sheets that absorbed nothing!

I'm here!

Wow...I'm here in Rwanda and I am surprised how green and beautiful Rwanda is compared to Ethiopia. There are some HUGE homes here too. It really is the Land of a Thousand Hills...so breathtaking!

Rwanda or bust!

I fly to Rwanda to serve with missionary friends and turn in my dossier. I am praying that they can review my paperwork and give us the approval letter during my stay in the country so that I can identify a child while I'm here. I can't wait to go help out at the orphanage!

Getting Started...the Home Study

With joyful anticipation we wrote the check to Child and Family Services to begin the home study process. We sent the check on a Tuesday and on Friday we received a response that gave us the name of our social worker and the letter said that she would contact us later in the week. I doubted that this would actually happen because it was the week before Christmas. However, I should have known that God has been pretty faithful in encouraging me and proving me wrong lately! The social worker DID call on January 5th and set up our first meeting for January 11th. I had been thinking about joining our pastor and Mike on a mission trip to Rwanda. The trip was scheduled for February 5th and I was hoping to bring my dossier with me to submit to the Rwandan government, however I knew that I was dreaming because our first meeting for the home study was the 11th of January and I would be leaving a few short weeks later. Well, we met with the social worker on January 11th and I asked her what she thought the time frame would be until we could expect the final report. She said she thought it could be done the first week of February! Brock and I looked at each other in amazement because everyone tells you that the home study takes about 3 months. She noticed our shock and we then told her that I was going to Rwanda the first week of February and if I really could get the paperwork by then, that there might be a chance of the authorities releasing info on the children at the orphanage so that I could identify a child during this trip. When she heard this she said she would try to get it done by the end of January. That is only 3 weeks compared to the 3 months we were expecting. Isn't God GREAT!!!

Can God multiply? OH YES!!!

The day of the auction had arrived. The list of items we collected totaled a retail value of $6000.00. We were told to only expect about a third of the retail value to come back to us so my goal for the evening was to bring in $2000.00 to cover the cost of the homestudy so that we could really get the process started. That night we added up the bids and were amazed at God's multiplication abilities! We raised $4000.00. God doubled my goal. Praise Him!
In the weeks to follow, more donations come in from family and friends as they found out about our new calling. Praise Him some more!!

Plan B

We decided to contact local businesses for donations that we could place in a silent auction at a nearby restaurant. the retaurant was very generous and offered us 50% of all the meals for the night of the auction. What a blessing! We felt instantly that we were in His will. We continued on in confidence that He was in this. I wish I could say that everyday I felt His presence and never felt defeated, but I would be lying. During this process I had many tearful days feeling frustrated as people made promises that never came to fruition. Fortunately, I had good friends who would always remind me of all God has done so far and that He could multiply our efforts in ways that the world could not!

OK Lord, but how???

I began researching all I could on international adoption. We knew that it was only by God's grace that we would be able to make this a reality, financially speaking. We did not have any money in our budget to put toward the cost of this adoption. We just knew that somehow God would make a way. As I researched a few websites on grants for adoptive parents I quickly learned that you can't even apply for these grants until you have an approved homestudy. This was to cost around $2000.00. I was a little discouraged until I saw some ads for fundraisers that seemed interesting. I launched a "phoneraiser" which would gather people's old cell phones and ink jet cartridges. I would then mail them to a company who would pay the shipping and also give a certain amount for each phone and cartridge. It really was very simple. However, we soon realized that this was not going to yield much in the way of finances. After a short break to seek God and pray about our next move, we initiated Plan B.